Who cares about the moon? Nothing is there expect for dead whales and Tom Cruise.

Whitey on the moon

Brilliant!! Just what we need in this time of deficit and debt. A nice, expensive voyage into space.

Lets say you're the owner of two companies.  One company produces products for the civilian market, another produces products for the military.  Both products do roughly the same thing.  The military version of the product however, is 50 years ahead of the civilian version, costs less money to produce and performs better and lasts longer, but the science and technology behind it is classified.  Now, lets say the cost to produce and improve upon an inferior system goes up drastically in a short amount of time.  Lets say the public loses interest in the product, but the military version continues to be utilized and improved upon.  Lets say it costs more to research ways to improve upon an already obsolete technology when the superior technology already exists and is relatively perfected, and has been for some time.  What would you do?  I sure as hell wouldn't continue to waste time, manpower and money on a project which is entirely based on obsolete technology and junk science.  NASA is and always has been a gigantic psychological operation meant to instill a false sense of technological advancement (or lack-thereof).  It was never meant to be the vessel by which we explore our solar system and the galaxy.  Something will replace that exploratory essence of its operation in time, and using technology that will allow us to see and do more in space than we ever thought would be possible in our lifetimes.

I don't think we're losing ground.  I think we're preparing for a fundamental change in the level of technology we assume humanity is capable of.  Those technologies involved in the military space agendas are and will be available to all of us eventually.  They will revolutionize communication, medicine, and most significantly.. propulsion and power generation.  If NASA has to bite the dust in the mean time I'm all for it.

Unless you sell tickets to the moon for space tourism, there really isn't any reason to go back––-unless you're willing to invest small nations' worth of money to establish a base from which you can dump even larger small nations' worth of money into going somewhere else in the solar system, complete with bone density loss, the risk of an explosive depressurization from a tiny space snot glob ripping through your craft's hull, and decreased ability to do much of anything once reacquired with gravity.
Besides, there's votes to be bought via the welfare system

When I was 7 (way before OP was born) I heard on the radio or television that someday people might go to the moon.  I pressed my cheek against the cold window late at night and looked up at the moon.  Later, when being driven through west Texas, I looked up at the star filled sky and wondered whether or when we would go to the starts.  It would mean leaving earth and home, but one day it would be done.

If mankind can fashion a spaceship from the dust of the earth, anything is possible.  And, we have done that already.

I may not go to the stars, but some day those who come after us will do so.

The original trip to the moon started in much the same way...

What's stopping you?

Then tell her the only way she'll be able to get up there is on a Russian rocket....

It will happen.

Give it a few decades.  India, China and Russia want to go there and beyond to prove (or re-prove in the Russian case) their status as nations.

With this threat, there will be a new space race, and we will not sit it out.  Even a dem would throw money at this to "create jobs" and "stimulate" the economy.  But it will probably be 20-50 years.


It is sad we have wasted 100 years of research and development work.

But who knows, some breakthroughs in materials science could mean a space elevator is feasible and that would be a game changer.

Now that you mention it. If it wasn't for the Space Program, I would not be where I am today. Granted I'm not really far, but it kept my dad employed for a while.

He was working for IBM under contract to NASA. He got to work on all the computers in Mission Control. He knew alot of the actual people from Apollo 13. The real people that the story was about.

Hell, I even knew a fucking ASTRONAUT!! A real life astronaut. Why the hell I didn't think that was hot shit back then, I do not know.